Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
Strongly in support of the pro-consciousness lobby, though for a com-
pletely different reason, is the Stanford University cognitive scientist
Bruce Mangan, who claims that “Consciousness is an information-
bearing medium.” [10] Mangan's thesis is that consciousness incorpo-
rates cognitive information in a similar way to which DNA incorporates
genetic information.
I propose to formalize the notion of consciousness in a slightly new
way: consciousness is simply one information bearing medium,
among many others, at work in our organism. Consciousness tends
to bear information that is relevant to novel evaluations either ex-
pected or at hand and consciousness bears its information as expe-
rience (or “qualia”, but I try to avoid this term). [10]
We have now run a whole gamut of opinions on whether robots can
have
consciousness, and you should, by now, be at least accepting the
possibility
of consciousness in robots. The next question is “How can
machines be
given
consciousness?” Since we do not know exactly what
consciousness is, nor what makes it, exactly what should we program into
a robot to give it consciousness or to enable it to evolve consciousness?
The designers of MIT's Cog robot have definite ideas as to how they
could give Cog consciousness. It has been argued that nothing could
properly matter to an artificial intelligence and that mattering is crucial
to consciousness. Cog's creators made a deliberate decision to make Cog
as responsible as possible for its own welfare by giving it some innate arbi-
trary preferences, goals if you like. Cog will know if its goals are thwarted
or achieved, and can be artificially sad or happy accordingly. Although
its sadness and happiness may not be exhibited in exactly the same ways
as they are in humans, the same can be said of similar organisms such
as clams or houseflies. They are organic—would we deny the possibility
that they can possess consciousness?
And when robots do have consciousness how will we be able to recog-
nize and test that consciousness? As they become more advanced, robots
will pass various variations on the Turing Test, and when they do so it will
be difficult to deny that they possess consciousness. We must also accept
that we might in the future recognize types of consciousness that are to-
tally and utterly different from human consciousness and from any other
type of consciousness with which we are familiar, such as consciousness
in animals.
